Any principle in itself isn't without critique, agree, but it's still the choice being made to pick this specific principle that tells the whole story. There are so many principles to pick from and the tech dept pick follows up with a "We have a 3-month “no refactoring” rule for new hires. This isn’t everyone’s preferred work style! We try to be up front about stuff.", which sounds a bit like an additional perform or else... principle that just delays ownership of the stuff you're supposed to work with. In the best case that sounds like naiive optimism and in the worst case that's gross negligence... neither one speaks "engineering" to me.

It is absolutely not a "perform or else" rule. Why are you reading so far into this? We really do have a rule about tech-debt changes, and it's a useful insight into why you might or might not want to work here, which is why we bring it up, despite the possibility it might alienate people; we'd like to be as honest as we can be. Worrying about people reading hustle-culture bullshit into stuff like this is a reason not to be transparent, which sucks.